26 inches: the end of the 23 and 24 inch?
Manufacturers have the intention of doing exactly what they did at the end of 2006. Just as 22" monitors have almost spelled the end for 20 and 21" LCDs (also the 19"), today the 26 and 27" are about to replace the current 23 and 24". The recipe for this to be successful is really simple; sell a bigger monitor for the same price and with the same technology but with identical definition. The resolution of future 26 and 27" monitors will be 1920 x 1200 pixels like the 23 and 24". The monitor displays the same amount of information, but it’s bigger.
As usual, some approve of this method and others don't. We believe that it is a good thing. Readability is better and watching movies or playing games is more comfortable without putting too much of a strain on the graphic card.
We tested the first 26" monitor available on the market designed by NEC:
Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome the very new Nec MultiSync LCD2690WUXi !!!In short, this is a 26" NEC monitor.
The panel : an IPS 6 ms !
It started to sound interesting when we found out that it doesn't have a PVA panel like most monitors. It’s an IPS with a response time of 6 ms. Please note that we already found this IPS 6ms in another monitor, the excellent NEC MultiSync 20GX. It’s the fastest 20" but has a glossy panel, which has the unpleasant side effect of showing your reflection as soon as there is a light source in the room.
For the 26", NEC chose a mat panel, which we like much better.
The tests
We run tests for reaction time in games, delay of display, and video rendering (SD, HD 720p, HD 1080p). We also evaluate ergonomics, viewing angles, and the quality of upscaling.
For color fidelity we use the LaCie Blue Eye Pro colorimeter, based on the Gretag tool and coupled with the new LaCie software suite. More evolved than the previous version, this helps us to compare a monitor’s display quality (color spectrum and DeltaE) in standard settings and after calibration. Results are sometimes surprising as it’s often best to take the time to manually adjust colors (or at least contrast, brightness and color temperature).
The results of the study of 18 patches makes it possible to draw patterns visually resituating the variation of colors compared to an ideal gray scale.
For game tests, after developing a response time measuring procedure last year with a probe and an oscilloscope, we eventually came to the conclusion that the measurements weren’t representative of what we actually saw on the screen. We then developed a new test procedure in the summer of 2005, based on pictures of images on the monitor. In this way we can capture afterglow in two environments. The first is between bright colors, and the second is for black and white (like in wire frame mode). The software used is
Pixel Persistence Analyzer (or PixPerAn for regular users). Pictures showing these ghosting effects are captured with a Canon 350D at a shutter speed of 1/1000 s. We take 50 pictures in burst mode for each test to precisely measure the progression of afterglow between images. This time results are consistent with what we see in games. Finally, practical tests are the same in games, HD and DVD video, web surf etc.
The test computer is self-assembled, has an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ processor and NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX card.
